Worldwide, an increasing number of students seek private supplementary tutoring, known as ‘shadow education.’ Various studies report social class differences in the use of shadow education. High-SES families may invest in shadow education as a form of concerted cultivation, seeking to improve their children’s school achievement. In this study, we apply meta-analytic structural equation modeling to explore relationships between parental education, income, and the use of shadow education across nations and educational contexts. We find robust relationships between parental education, income and the use of shadow education. Moreover, we assess a mediating role of shadow education in the relationship between SES and achievement. Shadow education appears to fulfill a competitive function for privileged families who seek to secure advantage in educational competition. We conclude that educational research, particularly research concerned with inequality of opportunities, needs to take account of the progressively prominent position of shadow education in the educational landscape.
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At the age of a failing economic system and undeniable evidence of the effects humankind has had over the planet, it is necessary to look for alternatives to the way we live locally. This article explores the use of designing narratives and metanarratives to co-create imaginaries serving as the needed alternatives. This research starts by considering the historical factors to understand how industrialisation and the loss of traditional practices created a culture of disconnection from Nature in the Girona area, but also looks at why people start now reconnecting with it. The analysis is the foundation for speculative design practices to co-create a new local narrative of connection and regeneration. The project adopted the Integrative Worldviews Framework and used paradoxes to create possible future worldviews based on historical factors and literature. Citizens participated in conversational future-visioning workshops to develop and evaluate their local imagery of the previously created worldviews. This conversation-based exercise evidenced the potential of paradoxes in destructive futures to create imaginaries of regeneration. These imaginaries merge and form future stories. From the future narratives, the practice created cultural artefacts embodying a new culture of connection based on storytelling, traditional jobs, and a mythological understanding of Nature. Finally, as observed at the end of the project, these artefacts allow citizens to adopt them as their culture and expand their current worldview.
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The past decades have shown an accelerated development of technology-enhanced or digital education. Although an important and recognized precondition for study success, still little attention has been paid to examining how an affective learning climate can be fostered in online training programs. Besides gaining insight into the dynamics of affective learning itself it is of vital importance to know what predicts trainees’ intention to transfer new knowledge and skills to other contexts. The present study investigated the influence of five affective learner characteristics from the transfer literature (learner readiness, motivation to learn, expected positive outcomes, expected negative outcomes, personal capacity) on trainees’ pre-training transfer intention. Participants were 366 adult students enrolled in an online course in information literacy in a distance learning environment. As information literacy is a generic competence, applicable in various contexts, we developed a novel multicontextual transfer perspective and investigated within one single study the influence of the abovementioned variables on pre-training transfer intention for both the students’ Study and Work contexts. The hypothesized model has been tested using structural equation modeling. The results showed that motivation to learn, expected positive personal outcomes, and learner readiness were the strongest predictors. Results also indicated the benefits of gaining pre-training insight into the specific characteristics of multiple transfer contexts, especially when education in generic competences is involved. Instructional designers might enhance study success by taking affective transfer elements and multicontextuality into account when designing digital education.
MULTIFILE